The temperature finally dipped to the single digits in the last few days, and I was overcome by a powerful urge to make soup.

I have 51 cookbooks on my shelves at last count, but since I was taking on the job of Russian adoption blogger, I begged one of my sisters for one of hers, Please To The Table. This book is a wonderful compendium of recipes from Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union, and much truer to the taste than The Russian Tea Room Cookbook, which I also own. Though the food in the Russian Tea Room was (and I suspect now is once again) wonderful, the cookbook was published 25 years ago, before a lot of real Russian ingredients were widely available here and it made compromises for the home cook. My sister Rosemary, a Culinary Institute of America grad, relies on Please To The Table when dreaming up menus for her great catering company, The Fruited Plain. That's good enough for me.

I had ventured into Soviet soups before. A St. Petersburg-raised neighbor gave my mushroom barley the thumbs up, and I make a pretty decent borscht. (If you want the lowdown on the best borscht in America, however, read my friend Ann's comparison of beet soups at New York City's Polonia and Veselka.)

Please To The Table devotes 50 pages to soup recipes, and one of the first was for a cabbage soup called Shchi, which author Anya von Bremzen calls "the great soup of the Russian people". I had no clue how to pronounce it. But I had been re-reading Lidia Bastianich's cookbooks to prep for a story I was writing about her for USAirways inflight magazine, and Shchi seemed to have a lot in common with one of Lidia's favorites, Yota. So Shchi it was.

I can't give you Please To The Table's recipe without violating copyright, and there's unfortunately nothing like it on RusCuisine.com. But Shchi brings together dried wild mushrooms, beef stock, green cabbage and sauerkraut, and the result is … a great soup indeed.